Frame by Frame, Developing a Picture of Vietnamese New Orleans

Growing up in New York City in the 1960s, Sindler was surrounded by museums. At institutions like the Museum of Primitive Art, the Museum of the American Indian, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he absorbed the breadth and diversity of world cultures. When he arrived at Tulane University in 1972, he set his sights on a degree in anthropology, with aspirations of working in Mesoamerican archaeology. A photo essay for a fieldwork assignment changed all that.

From 1974 to 1975, with the support of a Kenneth J. Opat Fund grant awarded by the anthropology department to undergraduate students, Sindler interviewed and photographed a group of people living in what was then referred to as Skid Row (now known as the Warehouse District). The university’s student newspaper, the Tulane Hullabaloo, ran a photo essay featuring Sindler’s words and images from the fieldwork, and shortly thereafter he became a staff photographer.

For his senior thesis, he focused on documenting the community of visually impaired persons and their sighted helpers at Lighthouse for the Blind. Following graduation, he photographed the elderly residents of Kingsley House while working there as a gerontological social worker. Around this time, Sindler also collaborated with WYES to document gospel music in Black Baptist churches of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The immersive project, where Sindler formed friendships with musicians like the late Raymond Myles, provided another opportunity for him to practice the kind of deeply embedded visual storytelling that would become his life’s work.

After reading an article in the Vieux Carré Courier reporting on the growing refugee community in New Orleans East, Sindler realized there was a unique opportunity to document this cultural group in transition. Renting a small apartment in Versailles, he began to make daily rounds through the neighborhood. After his walks, he would develop the film using his kitchen as a makeshift darkroom.

In time, Sindler approached the director of the Vietnamese Apostolate, Father Dominic Lương, about introducing him to parishioners, but Lương encouraged him to build relationships on his own. Lương’s advice proved sound. Sindler spent two years fostering connections among the community, which gave him and his photographic subjects a solid foundation for creating images of powerful intimacy and specificity.

Sindler and his camera followed the newcomers as they reimagined home against the backdrop of southeastern Louisiana. However foreign the culture, the region’s climate and landscape felt familiar, and many took up work in the commercial seafood and fishing industries. They brought innovation with them, utilizing their unique style of boatbuilding to construct what were colloquially called “chopsticks” boats, vessels characterized by long poles and skids that pushed trawl netting, as opposed to dragging it. The different design meant nets could be emptied of catch more efficiently, requiring less effort and expense to operate than the typical “otter” trawl rigging. As a result, Vietnamese fishermen handily competed with local white shrimpers. Tensions roseOpens in new tab as territorial locals regarded the novel methods with suspicion, accusing the Vietnamese shrimpers of overfishing and damaging oyster beds with their techniques. Eventually the passage of Louisiana House Bill 1247 in 1984 made the use of the “chopsticks” trawling method illegal in state waters. (An articleOpens in new tab published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1987 tested the two methods at different depths and reported no observable damage to the sea floor.)

Others in the burgeoning community found work at seafood processing plants, or pursued technical vocations like welding and construction. Some opened small businesses ranging from restaurants to dental labs to radio repair shops. Many residents carried on longstanding agrarian traditions in their new home, farming small backyard plots or expansive levee gardens irrigated by water accessed from the nearby canals. Market gardens gave older residents in particular a way to ensure financial stability and cultural continuity. Vietnamese cultivars were—and still are—grown, bartered, and sold among the community at weekly markets, ensuring the persistence of ethnic foodways.

Central to the identity of many refugees was devotion to the practice of Catholicism. Sindler’s documentation traces the full arc of their parish development, from parishioners attending Mass in a mobile trailer to the eventual establishment of Mary Queen of Vietnam, the first Vietnamese American Catholic parish in the country, in 1983. We see the church play a central role in people’s lives over the years—children’s christenings, first communion ceremonies, choir groups, crowds attending outdoor Mass, and lengthy processions of the faithful during occasions like the Feast of the Assumption.

Faith was a unifying force for much of the Southeast Asian diaspora, and Sindler documented the activities of other faith communities rapidly growing in New Orleans at the time. Dozens of rolls of film feature Buddhist devotees of Vietnamese and Laotian descent participating in celebratory rituals or monks leading small prayer services inside a home in Woodlawn. Other views document the Chùa Bô Dê Temple site dedication on the West Bank, the careful preparation and installation of that temple’s Buddha, and New Year celebrations later held there.

Many photographs show overt depictions of acculturation, like young women participating in the Miss Áo Dài beauty pageant or a group of children showing off their throws from a Mardi Gras parade, but some of Sindler’s most moving images capture more intimate facets of everyday life—kids running around the neighborhood or going to the movies, people celebrating at a wedding, or family mourning the loss of a loved one.

Through Sindler’s lens, we witness people become parents, raise families, and grow their community with a distinct, newly adapted cultural identity. These scenes don’t impose an American identity over a Vietnamese one. Rather, they illuminate moments big and small where cultural differences are bridged, not erased.